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Jun. 10th, 2005 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopA week ago Wednesday was my grandmother’s funeral.
And on Sunday afternoon, my uncle flew back to Adelaide, so it’s all been officially over for a while now. I take a while to process these things. Longer to actually write up posts.
I don’t mean for this to come across as a ‘pity me’ post. This was not something tragic that came out of the blue. She was over eighty. Some months back she suffered a relapse of a cancer which had been in remission for over a decade. You know where this leads. But she’s been out of hospital and stable, albeit far from healthy, for ages now - and, because life is like that, we spent a lot of those months far more worried about the ninety-something grandmother on the other side of the family who’d wound up in hospital for her own reasons. For most of the last month or so though, they’ve both been out of hospital looking as healthy as could reasonably be expected, if not better.
All the real warning we had started a little over two weeks ago, when she was readmitted to hospital again with two new infections; the doctors making it clear this was worse than ever before. She died that Friday morning.
My mother’s father died over a decade ago, so this wasn’t my first funeral for a grandparent. He, however, was a man who’d for years dedicated himself to making my mother’s family uncomfortable, and who no-one really had any fond memories of beyond mild amusement over some of his more inexplicable habits (most of which involved collecting hardware which he never used, or indeed, even unwrapped). His funeral was… respectful, I guess; but not something to work up much feeling about. I did know at the time it could only get worse from here.
I still didn’t realise just how hard this would hit me.
I can’t pretend I was as close to my grandmother as I perhaps could have been. Seeing our grandparents is a family thing, so most of the conversations I’ve had with her for a long time went through or at least past my sisters and parents. When we were kids though, one of the highlights of every school holidays was getting to stay a weekend with Nanna and Granddad. She fired pots in her own kiln, made us clothes - must have tried any number of arts and crafts before her eyesight really started to go - and sometimes spent most of dinner bemoaning how much better the cake turned out last time she tried the recipe. (The cakes were nearly always excellent anyway.)
My Dad’s family emigrated here from England when he was a kid, it was only a few months ago our family celebrated 50 years in Australia. In her own right she had a pretty extraordinary life. She was an aircraft mechanic during the second world war - the only woman in her squad. Actually, she and Granddad both were; the crucial difference there being that he didn’t start out as a dressmaker and didn’t have the social shakeups of the period to thank for the fact he got that chance at all. Just how unusual that was for the time wasn’t something that really struck me until a few years ago, and I really wish I’d had more chance to talk to her about it. The last time they were over for dinner before she first went into hospital was one of the few times she really got going on the subject.
Life’s like that, isn’t it?
The funeral was never going to be pleasant, but it was genuinely touching to see how many people came (almost everyone from her pottery club, their ex-next door neighbours, any number of relatives I didn’t know I had) and the effort that went into the proceedings - particularly the flag of British Royal Air Force they found to drape over her coffin. But the whole point of funerals is to give the living a formal chance to say goodbye, and I started sniffling almost as soon as we arrived for the final viewing, and I never really stopped until it was all over.
And then afterwards, we drove down to Fremantle for lunch with Granddad and Uncle, went for a walk along the river, watched some sail-boarders, and talked about whatever. Pretty simple, but it was the right thing to do at the time. It did help a little.
What’s really worried me most all along is Granddad. They’ve been Nanna-and-Granddad for as long as they’ve been anything I understood. He’s damn healthy for a man of eighty and has always been one of the most cheerful people I know, but Nanna has been such an intrinsic part of his life for so long that I don’t think I can imagine what he’ll do now.
The afore-mentioned tool-collecting grandfather aside, I’ve long had three grandparents I’m proud to be related to. As things stand now, I could well lose another grandmother within a year.
I’m perfectly aware that everyone goes through this, and it’s always a little different, and I know that. It's just something else to finally know that first hand.
And on Sunday afternoon, my uncle flew back to Adelaide, so it’s all been officially over for a while now. I take a while to process these things. Longer to actually write up posts.
I don’t mean for this to come across as a ‘pity me’ post. This was not something tragic that came out of the blue. She was over eighty. Some months back she suffered a relapse of a cancer which had been in remission for over a decade. You know where this leads. But she’s been out of hospital and stable, albeit far from healthy, for ages now - and, because life is like that, we spent a lot of those months far more worried about the ninety-something grandmother on the other side of the family who’d wound up in hospital for her own reasons. For most of the last month or so though, they’ve both been out of hospital looking as healthy as could reasonably be expected, if not better.
All the real warning we had started a little over two weeks ago, when she was readmitted to hospital again with two new infections; the doctors making it clear this was worse than ever before. She died that Friday morning.
My mother’s father died over a decade ago, so this wasn’t my first funeral for a grandparent. He, however, was a man who’d for years dedicated himself to making my mother’s family uncomfortable, and who no-one really had any fond memories of beyond mild amusement over some of his more inexplicable habits (most of which involved collecting hardware which he never used, or indeed, even unwrapped). His funeral was… respectful, I guess; but not something to work up much feeling about. I did know at the time it could only get worse from here.
I still didn’t realise just how hard this would hit me.
I can’t pretend I was as close to my grandmother as I perhaps could have been. Seeing our grandparents is a family thing, so most of the conversations I’ve had with her for a long time went through or at least past my sisters and parents. When we were kids though, one of the highlights of every school holidays was getting to stay a weekend with Nanna and Granddad. She fired pots in her own kiln, made us clothes - must have tried any number of arts and crafts before her eyesight really started to go - and sometimes spent most of dinner bemoaning how much better the cake turned out last time she tried the recipe. (The cakes were nearly always excellent anyway.)
My Dad’s family emigrated here from England when he was a kid, it was only a few months ago our family celebrated 50 years in Australia. In her own right she had a pretty extraordinary life. She was an aircraft mechanic during the second world war - the only woman in her squad. Actually, she and Granddad both were; the crucial difference there being that he didn’t start out as a dressmaker and didn’t have the social shakeups of the period to thank for the fact he got that chance at all. Just how unusual that was for the time wasn’t something that really struck me until a few years ago, and I really wish I’d had more chance to talk to her about it. The last time they were over for dinner before she first went into hospital was one of the few times she really got going on the subject.
Life’s like that, isn’t it?
The funeral was never going to be pleasant, but it was genuinely touching to see how many people came (almost everyone from her pottery club, their ex-next door neighbours, any number of relatives I didn’t know I had) and the effort that went into the proceedings - particularly the flag of British Royal Air Force they found to drape over her coffin. But the whole point of funerals is to give the living a formal chance to say goodbye, and I started sniffling almost as soon as we arrived for the final viewing, and I never really stopped until it was all over.
And then afterwards, we drove down to Fremantle for lunch with Granddad and Uncle, went for a walk along the river, watched some sail-boarders, and talked about whatever. Pretty simple, but it was the right thing to do at the time. It did help a little.
What’s really worried me most all along is Granddad. They’ve been Nanna-and-Granddad for as long as they’ve been anything I understood. He’s damn healthy for a man of eighty and has always been one of the most cheerful people I know, but Nanna has been such an intrinsic part of his life for so long that I don’t think I can imagine what he’ll do now.
The afore-mentioned tool-collecting grandfather aside, I’ve long had three grandparents I’m proud to be related to. As things stand now, I could well lose another grandmother within a year.
I’m perfectly aware that everyone goes through this, and it’s always a little different, and I know that. It's just something else to finally know that first hand.
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Date: 2005-06-09 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-10 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-10 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-10 03:19 pm (UTC)Hope I do better with my mother's father.
My grandmothers are both still alive. I've always found it easier to relate to male relatives than female relatives, though.
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Date: 2005-06-12 01:47 pm (UTC)That's interesting. Don't know that I've ever noticed anything similar; but then, (as mentioned) my own mother's father wasn't someone we really wanted to get to know, and the fact I'm not genetically related to either of my aunts always seemed a pretty good explanation for why I'm closer to my uncles than to them. Maybe there's something about changing gender roles across generations in that.
...or maybe this is just year 12 English Lit raising its head again.
I'm probably lucky just to have had all four grandparents living in the same city, on good terms with the rest of the family and in generally good mental health. I know a lot of people don't have those luxuries.